Social Psychology Flashcards
social psychology
Social psychology is concerned with how people influence other people’s
thoughts, feelings, and actions
how minds interact with each other
our long-term evaluations of
people are heavily influenced by
our first impressions
Nonverbal actions and expressions affect our first impressions:
How you initially feel about others will be determined mostly by
their nonverbal behavior (i.e., facial expressions, gestures, mannerisms,
and movements)
first thing we notice about another person
the face bc it communicates information, such as emotional state, interest, and distrust
eye contact is important in social situations, but how we perceive it depends on our culture
thin slices of behavior
Seconds-long observations offer powerful cues for impression formation
attributions
Explanations for events or actions, including other people’s behavior.
We’re
motivated to draw inferences in part by a basic need for order
and predictability.
A cognitive schema for an individual…
just world hypothesis
When bad things happen to people, we make sense of it by blaming
the victim—victims must have done something to justify what
happened to them
personal/internal or dispositional attributions
Refer to things within people, such as abilities, moods, or efforts
ex: that woman must be smiling bc she’s an upbeat person
situational/external attributions
Refer to outside events, such as luck, accidents, or the actions of other people
ex: that woman must be smiling because something good just happened
self-serving bias in making attributions about our own behavior
We attribute our successes to personal, permanent factors in a
way that gives us credit for doing well
We attribute our failures to situational, unstable, or
uncontrollable factors in a way that casts us in a positive light
ex: If you fail a test, you may blame your poor performance on not getting enough
sleep, or on the professor’s creating a bad exam; if you do well on a test, you may
attribute that good performance to your being smart
fundamental attribution error
Pervasive tendency to overemphasize the importance of personality traits and
underestimate the importance of a situation when explaining another’s behavior
stereotypes
based on automatic characterization
Cognitive schemas that help us organize information about people on the
basis of their membership in certain groups
- Allow for easy, fast processing of social information
- Occur automatically, largely outside of our awareness
- Affect impression formation
subtyping
When we encounter someone who does not fit a stereotype, we put that
person in a special category rather than alter the stereotype
ex: stereotype that all black people like watermelon; i don’t like watermelon; “not a real black person”
ingroups
groups we belong to
outgroups
groups we don’t belong to
ingroup favoritism
We are more likely to distribute resources to ingroup members than to
outgroup members. We are more willing to do favors for ingroup members and
to forgive their mistakes or errors
outgroup homogeneity effect
Once we categorize others as ingroup or outgroup members, we tend to view
outgroup members as less varied than ingroup members
ex: UCLA students may think that all Berkeley students are all alike, but notice the wide diversity of UCLA students
personal survival has depended on group survival
Keeping resources within a group while denying resources to
outgroup members may have provided a selective advantage
Robber’s Cave study
Sherif and his colleagues organized for 22 white boys from OKC to attend a summer camp at a lake
first week, each group lived in a separate camp on a different side of the lake and neither group knew the other existed
next week, groups competed in athletic tournaments
;ed to a lot of competition and animosity between the two groups; hated each other
phase 2: make them get along
sherif reasoned that cooperation should reduce hostility and so created situations in which members of both groups had to cooperate to achieve necessary goals
worked and the boyd became friends
results of robber’s cave
by introducing superordinate goals (goals that required people to cooperate) hostility is reduced btw groups
programs that most successfully bring groups together involve
person-person interaction
jigsaw classroom
Students work together in mixed-race or mixed-sex groups in which each
member of the group is an expert on one aspect of the assignment and then
return to their own groups and teach the material to their team members
800 studies of the jigsaw classroom have demonstrated that it leads to
more-positive treatment of other ethnicities and that students learn the
material better and perform at higher levels
attitude
people’s evaluations of objects of events or of ideas
People tend to develop negative attitudes about new things more quickly
than they develop positive attitudes about them
mere exposure effect
The more we are exposed to something, the more we tend to like it.
attitudes are acquired via
classical conditioning and operant conditioning
cognitive dissonance
An uncomfortable mental state due to a contradiction between two attitudes
or between an attitude and a behavior
ex: people smoke even though they know that smoking might kill them
people reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes or behaviors or rationalize the discrepancies
one way to get people to change their attitudes is to
change their behaviors first, using as few incentives as possible
ex: participants performed an extremely boring task and then reported to other participants on how enjoyable it was
participants who were paid more to lie about their experience reported enjoying it less
justifying effort
When people put themselves through pain, embarrassment, or discomfort to join
a group, they experience a great deal of dissonance
To resolve the dissonance they inflate
the importance of the group and their
commitment to it
ex: hazing rituals rely on cognitive dissonance to gain allegiance to a group
